Retronator

It’s been a while since a new pixel art editor joined the top ranks. Aseprite is the current go-to recommendation for desktops, while Pixaki (now in its 4th iteration) has always been my favorite on the iPad.

It’s time to add another worthy alternative for the owners of Apple Pencils, Pixquare, which is probably the closest you will get to Aseprite on iPadOS. Son Nguyen, the app’s developer, says he was inspired a lot by Aseprite, both for the UI and functionality. This is perhaps the most evident in the layer/animation system with the cel grid and of course support for importing and exporting .aseprite files.

I reviewed the app on my latest Twitch stream and it’s not (yet) as polished as Pixaki (just one example: pixel grid rendering is not pixel-perfect), but it had all the tools that I needed and more. Among unique capabilities are pressure sensitivity (great for more expressive pixel painting) and importing of Lospec color palettes (on the other hand, you can’t yet import palette files).

The biggest switching reason for me is the ability to export a timelapse (which I would say is an expected feature of iPad drawing apps at this point—thanks, Procreate!). For those of us who double as artists and content creators, being able to post a timelapse is very useful. This has been on the feature request list of Pixaki at least since 2021, so it’s been refreshing to see Son just go ahead and do it based on the beta test feedback. Going forward, now that v1 is fully released in the App Store ($10, or free Lite version that is limited to 2 files) he wants to continue developing the app based on user feedback, so also join his Discord if you decide to give it a chance.

One more timely thing, you have until the end of July to create an artwork in Pixquare (paid or Lite) to get a chance at winning $200 or $100 (plus app codes to share with your friends). Full details on participating in the contest are on Twitter.

This post has been 9 months in the making. 1 day for playing the wonderfully-illustrated city builder that is LakeSide by Massive Galaxy Studios, 1 day for trying to capture pixel-perfect GIFs, and 9 months for agonizing over the fact that it’s sometimes impossible to capture or post pixel-perfect GIFs, therefore, it’s better to not post anything at all until you feel so bad for your blog hiatus that you say enough is enough, get over it, and post this beauty of a game and talk about it because, really, that’s what matters. Apologies to Gonçalo Monteiro, the main developer, for waiting this long.

LakeSide is a bit of a rougelite in that you’re not building one eternal city over many sessions. Instead, it offers quick turnaround and replayability as you receive different building upgrades each time and experience random events. It’s currently in Early Access on Steam ($11 at 25% off right now, Windows-only) with new features coming out regularly, most recently the addition of armies and sieges. Oh, and if you’re wondering why the game looks this pretty, it’s simple: art is made by @kirokazepixel.

Haven’t been around much, so here’s a sort of catch-up post with y'all.

Most of my content lately has been on YouTube with the Pixel Engine devlog. It’s going strong with a video every two weeks (on episode 14 at this point) and I keep them short and sweet, about 5 min or fewer.

This blog has been very dormant this year. Having two jobs—neither of which is a walk in the park (making your own video game or running a physical school)—takes all of my creative energy. In my ‘free’ time on the weekends, I prioritize making the YouTube devlog. I wish I could do both, but to keep my life sustainable I have to draw the line somewhere and this year it’s been mainly in front of the blog.

I’m currently thinking of new ways how to get Pixel Art Academy out to more people, mainly a standalone, single-player version that jumps straight into the interactive learning parts. I’ll be working on this next year and closing the current pre-orders in my online store. If you wanted to play the current alpha and buy it in one go (instead of a Patreon membership), now’s the time to do it. Plus I’m having some big discounts before the pre-orders end:
— Basic game $5 (67% off)
— Full game $10 (60% off)
— Avatar editor $5 (50% off, upgrades from basic to full)

Note: Alpha access is not required to play the current version of the game, but will apply in the future.

I’m taking the next two weekends off, going on a retreat to recharge and plan the future. I wish you a lovely end of the year too and a happy 2023 when it comes. I’ll see you there!

p.s.: If you’re on Discord …

When Evil Licorice approached me to try out their new game Retro Gadgets, how could I refuse something that literally has my name in it!?!

It’s much like the fantasy console PICO-8 where you draw in a built-in sprite editor and write Lua code to make your own old-school-looking games. Except now you also get to design the hardware itself and choose your own specs! Want an egg-shaped tamagotchi? No problem. Remake your favorite calculator? You betcha. Use an LED matrix for playing a game of snake? In fact, I did all these when they commissioned me to create a few gadgets to show in their announcement trailer.

I love the skeuomorphic UI experience of it, tinkering at your workbench rendered in lovely pixel art. It’s just so cozy and if you put some vaporwave music to make retro gadgets to in the background, well, then you’d be living my life over the last few weekends and evenings, drawing dog sprites and trying to figure out the best way to calculate mathematical expressions in my WIP graphic calculator.

Unfortunately, you can’t get your hands on it just yet. The game’s demo will come out as part of Steam Next Fest on October 3rd so make sure to add it to your wishlist till then.

I’ve been adding support for drawing artworks into Pixel Art Academy and made this quick, half-res PICO-8 doodle to celebrate the new Monkey Island!

I also started a new Pixel Engine devlog where I go behind the scenes of developing my game. You can see the above artwork being drawn in the third episode.

A bit late celebration of the 40th anniversary of the one and only, the ZX Spectrum! 

Made this fan art quite some time ago for a project that took a different turn so it has never seen the light of day. Polished it up today for you to enjoy finding all the games in there!

Well, this is unlike anything I’ve covered on the blog before. Press Start is a series of gamebooks where you … play video games? Basically, you get to choose your own adventure in the local arcade and play one of the three games: Ghasts ‘n Gremlins, Shugendo, and Games of Death II (I’ll let you figure out yourself which titles these are inspired by).

The books are in the last day of their crowdfunding campaign (which is already funded), so act quickly if you’d like to get a printed version ($19 for a single book, $49 for all three) or a digital download ($21 for all three).

You know I can’t resist to talk about a point-and-click adventure, even if I don’t finish nearly as many of them as I enthusiastically support on crowdfunding platforms.

Beyond The Edge Of Owlsgard is the latest such gem, developed as a passion project over the last 4 years by the german solo dev Hans a.k.a. WatchDaToast. His pixel art skills and affinity for Saturday morning cartoons are self-evident, and what is great about this project is that it’s pretty much done. It’s aimed to release at the end of this year, with most of the remaining effort and the call for funding going into a fully-voiced experience in both English and German.

If you want to help make this dream come true and get a copy of the game on release, give Hans at least $23 over at Kickstarter. And if you’re not sure yet, first play the demo on Itch (Windows, Linux), and then do what’s good for you.

As a kid I went bonkers over any game with a built-in editor, from designing a pinball table in Macadam Bumper in the 80s to making tracks in Stunts (4D Sports Driving) in the 90s. I already knew how to program by the time Clickteam’s amazing tools started coming out (Klik & Play, Click and Create, The Games Factory, Multimedia Fusion), so my path took a different route, but I always kept an excited eye on editors such as Adventure Game Studio and Game Maker.

RPG in a Box is definitely a software I’d have my hands all over in my younger days—and even as an old-schooler fond of things like PICO-8, the voxel/pixel aesthetic definitely tickles my curiosity. The tool is a passion project of solo developer Justin Arnold, who released the initial version in 2015. He’s been able to work on it full-time since 2017, so the list of features keeps on growing.

So what’s in the box? A voxel editor, sprite editor, map editor, visual scripting, dialogue editor, sound FX generator, a bunch of camera modes … Yup, everything you need to make your first (and 2nd and 3rd) game with cozy tools.

Check the trailer below to see it in practice, along a diverse set of community projects. A demo is available on both Steam and Itch, whereas the full version will be a $25 investment into your (or your kids’) game development future!

Anonymous asks:

What is the name of the font, the bold one you use in titles and the thin one in other place? Greetings from a fellow font enthusiast!

Hello, font enthusiast! Here’s a full list of typography used in my game (which this blog is part of).

The title font you’re asking about is Acme 9 by Nikos Giannakopoulos. The font for the text body is my custom one made specifically for Retronator Daily (this blog).

Kingdom. Two Crowns. Norse Lands.

Kingdom has for a long time been my favorite pixel art game series, ever since its debut as one of Raw Fury’s first two published games. I wrote about all that in The fall and rise of Kingdom for Retronator Magazine. Good old 2016!

After the amazing sequel New Lands, Kingdom Two Crowns—the third title in the side-view strategy/tower defense series—brought co-op multiplayer and extra biomes including Shogun and the later-released free DLC Dead Lands. Long-time fans were also delighted about the more difficult Challenge Islands intermezzo, and now it’s time for the 4th full campaign!

Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands is the first paid expansion for Two Crowns and boy is it worth its money. I mean, did you see the screenshots above? The gameplay is as good as ever, but they’ve really outdone themselves in presentation. As if the always-reflecting river wasn’t at maximum eye candy already, I feel like the pixel art watercolor explorations by Franciszek ‘Franek’ Nowotniak (the environment artist on Norse Lands) really left a mark on the art style. The shading is done with big, chunky clusters so that the glorious background scenes combine with the forest hills and foreground trees into screenshot paintings worthy of being 5K wallpapers (which is exactly what I did for you here). The style is so consistent it’s sometimes almost at the detriment of gameplay as it took me some time to get better at noticing how many payable items a certain building has left. Not a problem for us Kingdom veterans however.

Not only does overachievement in presentation apply to the visuals, the soundtrack is also instrumental at making Norse Lands worthy of being a premium chapter. The music permeates the landscape wider than previously, delivered by the folklore-inspired band Kalandra. I don’t know how music can do that, but the four Norwegians make you feel the morning mist or the evening calm, as well as give you chills with atmospheric vocals and unexpected instruments. You’ll know when the blood moon is upon you more than ever before.

I’ll stop selling the game now, I mainly just wanted to add the amazing art to the blog. Do download those wallpapers. And if you need a mystically-cozy (and at night scary) world to dive into, get the game on Steam ($7 for DLC, $9 for Two Crowns at 50% sale currently, macOS, Windows, Linux) or other devices.

Only a few days left till the shmup Hyper Echelon, formerly known as Thyrian Defenders (which has nothing to do with the shmup Tyrian, hence the name change to avoid confusion), launches its Titan star fighter onto an unsuspecting alien horde of the Cyan Galaxy.

The artist on the game is none other than Raymond ‘Slynyrd’ Schlitter whose excellent pixel art tutorials I’ve been meaning to tout since forever, but haven’t gotten around to yet. As a long-time supporter of his Patreon it’s been nice to follow his journey, both with the learning resources as well as the ramping production of Hyper Echelon assets, which are an embodiment of the art style and approach from his tutorials.

In his latest Patreon post we finally also received the release trailer in the anticipation of the November 11 launch on Steam (macOS, Windows). I’ll let it speak about the gameplay for itself.

I often say that to play text adventures, you need to be in the mood for reading a book—skipping through text to get to the gameplay will do you no favors. In The Longest Road on Earth there is no text, but there are no goals either. If you were to sit down on a train during the morning commute, you’d need to be in the mood for putting on a melancholic album and staring out the window, contemplating life, instead of mindlessly scrolling on your phone. Rushing to the end will do you no favors, much like in life.

You could think of The Longest Road on Earth as a long playable cutscene, somewhere between a 4-part music video and a walking simulator. In fact, it often made me question if it’s a game with a really good soundtrack, or a music album with a really good interactive pixel art animation. The melancholic vocals of Beícoli match perfectly with the black-and-white pixels by Mohammed Bakir and Edu Verz, capturing so many small moments of everyday life, the routine, the solitude, the service, the disconnect, the expected and unexpected joy. It’s music and fine art more than gameplay, but that makes the intersection of the three that much more special as it’s unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

The Longest Road on Earth released already in May and it also took me a while to be in the mood for it. When you’re ready yourself to let emotions take you over, you can get it on Steam ($10, Windows), iOS ($4), or Android ($4).

I’ve had the joy of spending some time at the art studio of Christian Bazant-Hegemark in Vienna in 2018 and 2019 and got to know a game-developer-turned-fine-artist whose works fluently move between drawings, paintings, the computer generated, and back from digital to physical.

Stumbling down the freshly updated archive of his artistic journey, I wanted to highlight Pixelations, two series of pixel art works that bring Christian’s distinct voice to our medium.

Diary Works from 2020 (seen above) capture personal moments through his own lens. They are highly realistic, yet—through pixels and colors—stylized so that they put another level of nostalgia on top of the already rose-tinted glasses of remembering our past through moments frozen in time.

Political Works he started in 2017 are on the other hand pixel art interpretations of other photographers’ documentation of world events.

They make me remember RIOT: Civil Unrest, a simulation game that similarly used pixel art stylization to represent less joyful aspects of humankind. There’s something eerie in this juxtaposition, a welcome take that helps widen the expressiveness of our medium. To me it visualizes the cold 4th wall that separates my own life from the events happening elsewhere in the world. Can we really understand something we observe only through a (pixelated) computer screen?

Just like with other works by Christian, be it his large scale paintings or fragmented drawings, I can’t help but pause for a moment as his interpretations force me to explore complex emotions granted from a perspective different than my own.

To learn more about Christian, visit his website, and follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

Time flies fast and it’s hard to believe it’s been 4 years since Flynn: Son of Crimson by @thunderhorseco debuted on Kickstarter. I’m sure the devs (as all of us with crowdfunded games) wished time passed slower so we could make our estimated delivery dates, and Flynn—originally planned to release in February 2019—confirms my theory that Kickstarted games on average take 3–4 times as long to complete than predicted. It also speaks to my other theory, that the end result is most often well worth the wait! (Indie) game development is just hard and takes time.

I already put Flynn on my top 10 list of favorite upcoming pixel art games at the end of 2017 and the art holds up and even overdelivers in its release variety of environments and smooth animations. I’ll let the trailer do the speaking, and if you like a good action platformer, you can pick the game up on Steam ($18 during launch) or consoles.